> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.

If I don't have it in my calendar, it doesn't happen. I would fail to actually go to the event otherwise.

I used to consider myself a "tech guy" but the world seems to have moved on without me. I look at announcements of new phones and computers and I'm not even remotely excited about any of it. They're not solving any problem that I have anymore. I have a 9 year phone, and nothing released since then has really been compelling enough for me to upgrade. The only reason I will probably get a new one at some point is because the OS manufacturer and 3rd party app developers have (at best) stopped supporting my device and (at worst) are actively blocking my using their software/websites purely because of the age of the otherwise perfectly working device.

I used to have this "I'm missing something" thought but I don't think that anymore. This isn't me failing to get on board with what they think I should care about--It's the device manufacturers who are missing/ignoring my needs in the market.

Unless you're mailing letters, it's almost certain that your life is in "digital format". It sounds like you just don't use a calendar.

But surely you have an email confirmation for your movie, baseball, or event ticket. And maybe you texted or otherwise messaged with your friends who were going? Took pictures on your phone with them? Carried your phone with you when you went.

I'm right there with you. I work in tech, but I don't want to fuss with tech when I'm off the clock. Like, it all annoys me and just feels like work.

When my router breaks I just buy a new one. When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.

I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered. Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket? I have a rule "no new chargers" when buying stuff. If it comes with some proprietary charger I make a half-assed attempt to keep up with it but I just throw it in the trash after about 6 months and buy something with a cord.

Maybe I'm an old man, but maybe that means I know now that life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.

You don't add to your calendar but you probably got a confirmation email. Or you may have used an app that could expose this data to the operating system. OR, you called, and the phone app transcribed and summarized the call.

Same for the wallet... if you have your credit card / banking app installed it could expose this.

But yeah, none _needs_ any of that, for different degrees of fun and life optimization.

> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.

When I buy a ticket to an event and the e-mail about it arrives, Google automatically adds the event to my calendar. My wife and I have shared our calendars with each other, too, so we both see it no matter who buys the ticket.

I dont think I have left my house without my phone in 5+ years.

I think you're doing technology right tbh. We don't really need all this new tech, and it's better for the environment to just skip it and keep using what we have.

If you have an email receipt, and you store email on your phone, it's probably accessable. I don't think you're missing out on anything though.

Re: geek, AI has a lot of mainstream hype at the moment. I don't think there's anything inherently geeky about buying into the hype.

> (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).

Not to critique how you love but a little bum bag could fix this.

  > I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).

But I've also recently moved away from flagship phones and I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I also used to root devices and underclock them after having them for some years to help extend their lives. Similarly I didn't feel like I was missing out on much. But at the same time, whenever a new phone would drop I'd feel like there was this cool new feature yet when I actually had it in my hands none of those features were actually that big of a deal. Even if nice. So moving to a non-flagship is nice entirely due to it being smaller and fitting in my pocket better. And it's not all about the thickness...

  > Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".

I mean there's still lots of things to geek out about and lots of dreams and fantasies about the future and tech that just don't have anything to do with the current direction of innovation.

How do you get your tickets? Do you just buy in person at the theater or ballpark?

You are not a target customer for smartphones.

It's preference. I think the cameras on the non-pro iphones are so ugly -- especially the diagonal design. The pro cameras look ok to me. Can't not see my old college stove when I look at it, but I don't think it's too bad.

I, too, am biased but prefer Pixel's camera layout. Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device. A design decision that's unique and has some (small) utility.

Tier list:

Good: Pixel line, any phone with no camera bump Ok: iPhone Pro Bad: Samsung's many iterations, iPhone 2 camera vertical layout Horrible: iPhone 2 camera diagonal layout

>That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly.

Isn't it a market thing though? Doesn't Apple have a phone with horrendous, trypophobia-inducing camera nests?

They have the same camera bump design on the Pixel 9 phones.

I quite like it, it's a natural rest for my phone to sit at an angle (and protect the camera glass), and is great for holding it with a single hand.

I (and many other people) think the cameras look great and are a nice change from the repetitive boring Apple designs.

> Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill.

Buying dedicated hardware as a way to keep your AI bill down seems like a tough proposition for your average consumer. Unless you're using AI constantly, renting AI capacity when you need it is just going to be cheaper. The win with the on-device model is you don't have to go out to the network in the first place.

Just rumours but Apple is supposedly embracing a similar design for iPhone 17. https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-17/

I mean, look at these examples. Is a big LLM really needed to hit most of what people want?

Seems like Android just needs to lean into the voice command hooks API. A local LLM can grease the natural language into the mechanical APIs installed on your device. That's a much simpler task than an omniscient robot with access to all of your data.

The big win for those small local models to me isn't knowledge based (I'll leave that to the large hosted models), but more so a natural language interface that can then dispatch to tool calls and summarize results. I think this is where they have the opportunity to shine. You're totally right that these are going to be awful for knowledge.

The point in these models isn't to have all the knowledge in the world available.

It's to understand enough of language to figure out which tools to call.

"What's my agenda for today" -> get more context

cal = getCalendar() getWeather(user.location()) getTraffic(user.location(), cal[0].location)

etc.

Then grab the return values from those and output:

"You've got a 9am meeting in Foobar, the traffic is normal and it looks like it's going to rain after the meeting."

Not rocket science and not something you'd want to feed to a VC-powered energy-hogging LLM when you can literally run it in your pocket.

Speculation: I guess the idea is they build an enormous inventory of tool-use capabilities, then this model mostly serves to translate between language and Android's internal equivalent of MCP.

I've had Gemma 3n in edge gallery on my phone for months. It's neat that it works at all but it's not very useful.

This. I tried Gemini, twice, and each time my usual use of hand free tasks were no longer possible. This is what I don't understand, all these big tech companies think I want to have a conversation and ask questions to an AI in every part of my life but I do not. All I want is to tell my phone to put in a calendar invite, play a song on an specific app, navigate to somewhere, etc. My android phone triggers itself when listening to podcasts too, which is fun.

Weaker by what metric? Are you asking them to explain the fall of Rome to you?

The point of a small model isn't to be an interactive Wikipedia. It's there to call tools, get more data, aggregate the data and return a natural language result.

It does not "hallucinate", because it only uses what the tools provide.

The model might even make something up, giving police "reasonable suspicion". Not that it seems it's needed anymore in the US

Why would the police bother with that when they have forensic extraction tools, that itself possibly has AI built in? Why trust a quantized model on a phone that possibly could give you wrong answers?

This is absolutely being worked on. Limitless.AI has a hardware recorder + mobile app for reviewing your todos plus syncing / processing, and an AI backend, and an MCP API for ... whatever else you want to do. (plus a sprinkling of privacy / "HIPPA compliance" etc.)

I'm a customer of theirs. And I have NOT researched the subject much further. However given the tone and concern of the discussions by the other customers in the limitless forums, and of the devs, I am confident what you're asking is here or coming.

Oh really? I switched to an iPhone end of last year (for non-AI reasons), so I may be missing out. Is this on on-device model, or does it still dispatch to hosted Gemini? But I'd imagine that Gemini would have a great integration with Calendar and Gmail.

Yup. Fortunately Graphene OS will likely soon run just as well as on their previous hardware. You can re-googlify it as much as you're comfortable with.

But if it is all handled locally on my device, the idea is that there is no intrusion

why ? someone else has an idea, what is to hate that another person has an idea ?

how does their idea intrude into your life ?